LAW, LITERATURE, AND VICTORIAN STUDIES

Abstract

At first glance Victorian studies seems to have gained very little from the Law and Literature movement. This is because the core "literature" component of the Law and Literature canon has been extremely limited, consisting of a single nineteenth-century American text Billy Budd, Sailor and two early modern English texts The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. These texts are the recurrent focus of ongoing discussions in Law and Literature scholarship; they are the texts to which the relevant journals have devoted special issues or symposia. No Bleak House, no Felix Holt, no Orley Farm, and certainly not The Ring and the Book. The effects are palpable and obvious. In the several "Companion" series to Victorian writers and Victorian literature initiated during the past decade, references to law and legal matters are intermittent. The Oxford Reader's Companions to Trollope (1999), Dickens (1999), and George Eliot (2000) include entries on (respectively) "Law and Society," "Law and Legal Institutions," and "Law," but this series' companion to Hardy (2000) has no comparable entry. The Cambridge counterparts to the Oxford series consistently avoid the law. So The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel (2001) has essays on gender, sexuality, race, and industrial culture; detection (apart from Poor Law in the index) is as close to law as it gets. The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot (2001) has essays on just about everything but law: "George Eliot and . . ." philosophy, science, religion, politics, gender. It is therefore not surprising that this series' volume on Henry James (1998) includes no essay on the law, but it is still hard not to be surprised by similar omissions from the Oscar Wilde (1997) and Dickens (2000) volumes. Alexander Welsh has said: "Good companions are dependable, hence predictable and ready with the facts rather than striving to be new" (Welsh 2003, 117). But law and legal issues were certainly not new to the Victorians, as acknowledged by other "Companion" publications: the Blackwell Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture (1999) includes a "Legal" essay in its section on Walks of Life; the Blackwell Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002) has a substantial essay on "Laws, the Legal World, and Politics"; and in the section on Victorian Cultural Contexts in the Greenwood Companion to the Victorian Novel (2002) we find "Law and the Victorian Novel." The journals tell a similar story about the interaction between Law and Victorian Literature. The Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities dates from 1988; since that time it